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By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics

Books on FIRE

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Harry Potter Alliance
About
The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) is a non-profit organization established in 2005, promoting literacy, equality and human rights by turning “fans into heroes.” The organization taps the infrastructures of the thriving Harry Potter fan community, including blogs, podcasts, conventions, fan fiction sites, and wizard rock (Harry Potter themed music) concerts, to mobilize the fan community towards civic engagement. The HPA leadership includes a handful of paid staff members and a network of volunteer staff, dispersed around the nation, conducting most of their communication online. The local, more face-to-face-oriented component of the HPA includes a network of over 250 chapters in high schools, colleges and communities nationwide and abroad. The mostly youth-led chapters engage in national campaigns but also promote local projects based on their members’ interests.
In its nine years of existence, the HPA has engaged in multiple campaigns, some independent, and some in conjunction with established non-profit organizations. Every year, the organization runs book drives for communities in need. Perhaps their most visible campaign has been Helping Haiti Heal in 2010, in which they raised $123,000 in two weeks from small donations to send 5 cargo planes full of supplies to Haiti—an achievement reached in part due to their collaboration with the Nerdfighters. HPA’s more recent campaigns include Equality FTW (for the win), raising $95,000 for action around immigration, education and LGBTQ equality. The HPA has also mobilized around marriage equality, with members phone-banking to persuade residents of Maine and Rhode Island to legalize same-sex marriage.
In 2011, HPA launched Imagine Better, a project that aims to bring the model behind the HPA—mobilizing fan communities to civic action—to other fan groups and content worlds. Imagine Better has launched campaigns around the Hunger Games movie series and around the Superman movie Man of Steel.
See Neta Kligler-Vilenchik's By Any Media Necessary Chapter, "Decreasing World Suck", to learn more about the HPA, Imagine Better, and other groups who employ fan activism.
See the Harry Potter Alliance’s “Make it IRL” workshop, devised by HPA spokesperson Lauren Bird, for a hands-on workshop designed to encourage participants to make connections between popular culture and real-world issues.
Contributed by Neta Kligler-Vilenchik on 9/29/14
Harry Potter Alliance Media
The Harry Potter Alliance, A History
Why I Can't go to LeakyCon
Accio Books: LeakyCon Edition
How to Change the World
Books on FIRE
Andrew Slack Tedx Talk
“Decreasing World Suck” The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), a non-profit organization established in 2005, encourages civic and political engagement amongst Harry Potter fans by using metaphors from J. K. Rowling’s best-selling fantasy series. When the HPA was established, Harry Potter fandom was at its peak: two of the books had not yet come out, the movie series was just gaining steam, and the fan community was thriving. Yet even a 7-book, 8-movie series that has become a world phenomenon ends at some point. In terms of release of original content, that end came in July 2011, with the release of the last movie in the Harry Potter series. At that time, many feared that the fandom was also dissolving . At Leakycon 2011, a grassroots fan convention, young fans were talking about “the end of an era”, linking the series’ conclusion to their own ending childhood. As one HPA member puts it, with some degree of overstatement, “so obviously Harry Potter is over, sadly” (Daniela, 23). What happens to a civic organization that grounds itself in the connection to a prominent content world, when that content world increasingly loses its traction? The HPA tried to pre-empt this question by launching the “Imagine Better” Project in July 2011. The idea: applying the approach that has proven successful for the HPA—connecting fans around story worlds they love to create real world change -- to collaborations with other fandoms. The HPA can be seen as a prime example of fan activism—harnessing fan enthusiasm toward real world change. Yet to what extent is the example of the HPA a singular one? The Harry Potter phenomenon, after all, has been a remarkable success, with a generation of children “growing up with Harry”. This fan community was recognized as a particularly active and creative one -- among the first major fandoms to emerge alongside the internet and employed its increasing affordances. Moreover, many of the themes of the books seem particularly resonant with real-world issues, complemented by J.K. Rowling’s own history working for Amnesty International.
In our discussion of HPA and Imagine Better, we distinguish between two modes of fan activism, namely fannish civics and cultural acupuncture. Imagine Better unlike HPA’s earlier work moved from focusing on pre-existing fan communities (fannish civics) to an emphasis on reaching a broader public by experimenting with cultural acupuncture. We examine the difference between the two modes through two large-scale national campaigns that Imagine Better launched around the release of the first two movies in The Hunger Games series; whereas the first campaign (Hunger is Not a Game) uses fannish civics, the second campaign (The Hunger Games are Real) moves further on the continuum towards cultural acupuncture, with number of views reaching over 450,000 views.
Yet this model is not the only possible approach to fan activism. Consider the example of the Nerdfighters. Nerdfighters are an informal online community that took shape around the YouTube channel of the Vlogbrothers, John and Hank Green. The two brothers upload two videos a week, about “nothing in particular”, though always with their unique look and feel, including a fast pace of speech, multiple jump cuts, and elaborate use of inside jokes and jargon. Nerdfighters are not connected around a fictional content world, but rather around their affiliation with the Vlogbrothers and a broader “nerd” identity, yet the group has developed a shared social agenda, broadly characterized as "decreasing world suck". Beyond the Vlogbrothers’ own videos discussing current affairs (e.g. “Revolution in Egypt: a 4 minute introduction”), the young participants also are creating and posting their own videos in support of diverse charities and non-profits. The Nerdfighters have shown a capacity to mobilize rapidly around short-term, high impact civic goals: for example, the Foundation to Decrease World Suck raised $483, 296 in two days in 2012.
This chapter considers several approaches to connecting popular culture and civic engagement, looking across the Harry Potter Alliance, Nerdfighters and Imagine Better. All these groups, while unconventional in their language and civic style, have been successful in deploying popular culture engagement toward participatory politics. In this chapter, we identify different mechanisms through which this deployment works, and what forms of activism it enables, describing the intersections and interactions between fan communities, content worlds, and participatory politics.

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“Watch 30 Minute Video on Internet, Become Social Activist”
In Spring 2012, Invisible Children (IC), a San Diego-based human rights organization, released Kony 2012, a thirty minute video about child soldiering in Uganda. IC anticipated that the video might reach half a million viewers over a two month campaign. Instead, it reached more than 70 million viewers over the first four days and over 100 million over the first week. The video’s rapid circulation was heavily fueled by high school and college students, coupled with church groups. By comparison, America’s highest rated television shows reach 40-45 million per week, and Hunger Games, the top Hollywood blockbuster that week, drew 15-20 million viewers. Inspired by the video’s own celebration of the power of social media to change the world, IC’s young supporters had demonstrated the capacity of grassroots networks to shift the national agenda.

But, Kony 2012 drew sharp criticism from many established human rights groups and Africa experts, questioning everything from IC’s finances to its “white man’s burden” rhetoric. IC was especially challenged for being out of sync with current Ugandan realities and promoting responses some argued might do more harm than good. Critics have seen Kony 2012 as illustrating the kinds of institutional filters and ideological blinders that have long shaped communication between the Global North and South. Kony 2012 quickly became emblematic of a larger debate concerning attention-driven activism. As the controversy surrounding the video intensified, the filmmaker, Jason Russell, had a highly public meltdown itself captured on video and widely circulated online. Cut off from the besieged leadership, many young IC supporters lacked the skills and information needed to defend their positions or for that matter, to reflect more deeply about the complexities they were encountering within the larger debate around the campaign. IC’s approach demonstrated enormous “spreadability” (the capacity to “spread” its messages) but limited “drillability” (the ability to “drill” deep into the issues.)

Using our four years plus of researching Invisible Children as an extended illustration, this chapter will introduce the core concept of participatory politics. As we do so, we take seriously the critiques leveled against the Kony 2012 campaign, but we also take seriously what participation in the movement meant to young people around the world for whom circulating and commenting on this video might have been their first expressions as citizens. While many “traditional” civic organizations enable youth to participate based on an apprenticeship model, many of our examples here exhibit a more participatory model, in which young people are taking control of and shaping their own modes of engagement. In this model, learning takes place not only vertically, from expert to mentor, but also horizontally, from peer to peer. Such sites often blend the distinction between interest-based and friendship-based networks that have informed other work in the Connected Learning tradition: Young people may enter based on shared interests, may work towards collective goals, yet in the process, they become integrated into rich social communities that often motivate and reward their continued participation. Invisible Children is a fascinating hybrid of these more established and emergent models: locating many of its chapters in schools and churches, yet creating ample opportunities for learning through participation.

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